I feel your pain and I’m hoping I can help! I’m making a web UI that aims to be easier to use than existing ones.

Ah, good point.

I took a look at how the official Lemmy UI uses child_count, and it appears to use the number verbatim in its “X more replies” link. So if a comment tree were to include deleted comments, but child_count includes the deleted ones, I’d assume the displayed number would be incorrect.

Also, it appears that it only displays a load more link if no child comments are currently loaded for that comment and child_count is bigger than 0.

Interesting! If there are two deleted comments underneath 2157873, that could indeed explain the two “missing” comments.

It really doesn’t matter much to the user how many comments are going to be loaded next in my opinion, and that keeps it simple on our end.

Here’s what trips me up: even if I don’t display the number, I still need to know whether extra comments can be loaded on that depth. If not I don’t want to display a “Load more”. You could of course let the “Load more” load hidden comments at any level of that subtree, but I think that causes unexpected behavior.

Maybe this clarifies what I’m talking about:

In the case on the right, there’s an unexpected downward shift of content which may disorient the user.

Fair enough. I’m currently focused on creating my own Lemmy web UI, but later I might have room to submit some SEO-related PRs. While I’m not yet sure what needs to be done, instance owners can get tailored recommendations from Google. I have a hunch that Lemmy is currently being penalized for duplicate content, which we might be able to mitigate by adding `` to federated posts.

I’m fully with you on not wanting to cater to Google. On the other hand, if someone writes a helpful Lemmy post, I would like people who don’t know Lemmy to be able to find it.

I second this. I know SEO is a controversial term with Lemmy’s core audience, but being able to find posts through a search engine is pretty darn helpful. It’ll also help more people find their way to Lemmy, which will diversify the range of communities.

If you’re not sure where to start, Google’s free Search Console can give you insight into how your site ranks, how people are finding you and which factors are preventing instances from appearing in search.